priests in Egypt and Babylonia. The Greeks lived and travelled between the
two centres, and their earliest sages and philosophers were men of the
most varied intercourse and occupation. Their genius was fed by a wide
sympathy and an all-embracing curiosity. No other people could have
demonstrated so well the social nature of science from its inception, and
they were planting in a soil well prepared. In Egypt conspicuously and in
Chaldea also to a less extent there had been a social order which before
the convulsions of the last millennium B.C. had lasted substantially
unchanged for scores of centuries. This order was based upon a religious
discipline which connected the sovereigns on earth with the divine power
ruling men from the sky. Hence the supreme importance of the priesthood
and their study of the movements of the heavenly bodies. The calendar,
which they were the first to frame, was thus not only or even primarily a
work of practical utility but of religious meaning and obligation. The
priests had to fix in advance the feast days of gods and kings by
astronomical prediction. Their standards and their means of measurement
were rough approximations. Thus the 360 degrees into which the Babylonians
taught us to divide the circle are thought to have been the nearest round
number to the days of the year. The same men were also capable of the more
accurate discovery that the side of a hexagon inscribed in a circle was
equal to the radius and gave us our division of sixty minutes and sixty
seconds with all its advantages for calculation. In Egypt, if the
surveyors were unaware of the true relation between a triangle and the
rectangle on the same base, they had yet established the carpenter's rule
of 3, 4 and 5 for the sides of a right-angled triangle.

How much the Greeks drew from the ancient priesthoods we shall never
know, nor how far the priests had advanced in those theories of general
relations which we call scientific. But one or two general conclusions
as to this initial stage of scientific preparation may well be drawn.

One is that a certain degree of settlement and civilization was
necessary for the birth of science. This we find in these great
theocracies, where sufficient wealth enabled a class of leisured and
honoured men to devote themselves to joint labour in observing nature
and recording their observations. Another point is clear, namely, that
the results of these early observations, crude as they were